Global Product Management Talk

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

A lot of new products are announced at trade shows and other events, such as CES for consumer electronics, International Builders Show for construction materials, and the National Association of Music Merchants for all things musical. For many product people, participating in their industry trade show each year is one of the most important things they do.

The real pros who know how to launch products at trade shows are the ones who know how to compete for attention in noisy and crowded environments. It’s a real skill. They quickly capture interest and generate opportunities.

Consequently, they have knowledge and experience Everyday Innovators should have as well.

Which is why I spoke with one of the handfuls of people who large brands trust to announce their products at trade shows. She is Amy McWhirter, corporate event host, emcee, and trade show presenter. Her superpower is engaging audiences in an authentic way that creates connection.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Are your products not generating the revenue they should be just because you didn’t price them right? Pricing is a key concern of not only product managers and leaders but also the executives of organizations.

Knowing the right price for a product is a challenge, especially if the product is new to the market. But, how to you determine the right price?

If your pricing strategy resembles a dart board, there is a better way. You just need to know the steps and what data to collect to determine the right price.

Our guest, CEO and co-founder of ProfitWell, Patrick Campbell, is a pricing pro and he shares the steps to determining the price of any product. Before founding ProfitWell, he served as an Economist at Google.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

This is a listener requested episode. Several Everyday Innovators have asked, “What are the qualities of a good product manager?” While many listeners are already good product managers, a little self-reflection from time to time on your strengths and how to be an even better product manager is valuable to your career as well as to those who you work with.

One listener put this in a different light and asked who should not be a product manager. I thought that was a really insightful question.

So, the following discussion addresses both topics:  qualities of a good product manager and who should not pursue a career in product management.

To help us explore these topics, our guest is Marc Abraham, coordinator at ProductTank and author of the book My Product Management Toolkit: Tools and Techniques to Become an Outstanding Product Manager.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

I love hearing how companies improve their innovation capabilities and foster a culture of innovation. Anytime I hear such stories, I always find lessons for how other organizations can also improve their capability.

In my experience, this best occurs by enabling the largest number of employees to participate in innovation activities. More employees thinking and acting like innovators results in more innovation for the organization.

Cisco has had a program for the last four years that is built around an Innovation Challenge and Innovation Centers. It grew out of work with startups that expanded to Cisco employees.

To learn about this, our guest is the Managing Director of the Cisco Innovation Centers, Alex Goryachev. Alex enjoys turning disruptive concepts into emerging business models. He has a good cross-functional background for doing so, serving in senior roles in product development, marketing, finance, and sales.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Two spheres of capabilities are needed for product managers to be successful. One is competency in the processes, practices, and tools of product management. That is where I spend much of my time helping product managers and teams.

The other sphere is competency in what is often called the soft skills and aligned with leadership. It is this sphere that many people find more difficult to master, especially those of us from technical backgrounds. But, without these competencies, you are severely limiting your potential.

My passion is inspiring and equipping product managers and leaders. To that end, this is one of the most important discussions we have had yet on this podcast. At one point in the discussion with our guest, my passion for helping you and other product managers came out in the form of a few tears. Hopefully, that will make sense when you hear it.

My guest is Paresh Shah, who is pursuing his passion of helping engineers transform into innovators, intrapreneurs, and inspiring leaders. Paresh taps into his experience as a mechanical engineer, Harvard MBA, serial entrepreneur, leadership coach, and other roles to inspire you to future-proof your career, innovate more efficiently, and advance faster.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Many companies have faced disruption. Of course, Uber and Airbnb are the poster children of disruption, but there are many more. Kodak was displaced by the digital camera. Blockbuster’s physical doors could not stay open in the face of Netflix’s virtual service. Borders Books failed in the wake of Amazon.

Some companies have also managed to continue in the face of industry disruption, such as Best Buy and Barnes & Noble.

What companies, both big and small, established and startup, can do to avoid disruption is the topic of this discussion. Our guest is Dr. Thales Teixeira, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and research of digital disruption.

He has a new book examining disruption titled Unlocking the Customer Value Chain. We discuss how value is now being created for customers.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Figuring out what your customer wants and needs from your product or service is the heart of product management. That is the beginning of how we create products that customers love.

And, there are tools to help you do that. In this discussion, you will learn about a tool that has been available for a few years, but I rarely find product leaders and managers using it. It’s called the Value Proposition Canvas.

We explored the concept of value proposition back in episode 123 with Alex Osterwalder. Now we talk with his co-founder Alan Smith. Together they started Strategyzer, which may be best known for their award-winning books Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design and related training.

Alan is a multitalented designer and UX professional. He loves building tools to help drive strategy and innovation in organizations, which makes him a great person to talk with us, Everyday Innovators.

The Value Proposition Canvas consists of two sides:

customer segment profile, andthe value map

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Let’s face it, the smartest people don’t all work in your organization. The thought has been shared by many leaders, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and is originally attributed to Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and UNIX contributor. He said,

“The smartest people in the world don’t all work for us; most of them work for someone else.”

To benefit from the creativity of smart people who are external to your organization, you need a way to find and attract them to contribute their brain power. There are time-tested ways to accomplish this, including traditional open innovation, incubators, and startups.

Another approach is a partner program. Ford Motor Company has used this approach for decades. By continuously learning and improving, they are a leader in the approach with answers for others considering a partner program.

To explain how their system works and tips for implementing a partner program, Ed Krause joins us. He is the Global Manager External Alliances Research and Advanced Engineering at Ford Motor Company. He has global responsibility for developing cutting edge technology and competitive advantage for Ford by developing relationships and collaborative projects involving universities and partner companies.

Anyone interested in open innovation or a more formal partner program will find this discussion valuable.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Recently I was helping the product leaders and managers in a large non-profit organization improve their performance. When we discussed the use of MVPs, minimal viable products, one question asked was if the MVP approach applies to services. The answer is yes, and our guest shares an example that led to a new recycling business. The MVP approach, or if you prefer, the MVE for minimal viable experiments, is a significant philosophical shift for some people. It means doing the minimum needed to learn what creates value for a customer–aligned with solving a problem or satisfying a job they want done, before creating a complete product. I think of it as a series of small, fast, and inexpensive experiments that help us learn what a product should be.

Our guest is Abdo Riani, serial entrepreneur and founder of StartupCircle, which connects successful entrepreneurs with rising founders to help them move their ideas and businesses forward with actionable and relevant advice.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

The principles of Lean-Driven Innovation lead to more value for customers and faster value capture (e.g., revenue) for organizations. The principles can be applied to any industry, but for our guest, they grew out of the R&D and product development practices at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

Our guest is Norbert Majerus, who was the Lean Champion in Innovation at Goodyear, where he worked for nearly 40 years before recently retiring. Now he enjoys sharing his experience with others. He captures much of the practices he learned in his new book, Lean-Driven Innovation.